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Kaldor, Nicholas. 1981. “The Role of Increasing Returns, Technical Progress and Cumulative Causation in the Theory of International Trade and Economic Growth,” Économie Appliquée 34.4: 593–617.

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6 comments:

"don’t assume that people understand why it is reasonable to assume constant employment, or a self-correcting trade balance, or even that similar workers tend to be paid similar wages in different industries."

Debating JW Mason on the immigration issue in the comments here. Might prove illuminating as I think it's important that the left has this debate in public.

http://jwmason.org/slackwire/which-one-is-brexit/

My last comment which is now in moderation:

____

Rather than personalising it why not discuss the issue? Why don’t you explain why your position isn’t one of liberal paternalism that forces the views and needs of working people below your own abstract goals? That would be more constructive.

A nod to the empirics of the case would be helpful too.

Here’s how I see it. Middle class left-wingers see no impact of immigration on their wages. But there are impacts on working peoples’ wages. See:

“UK research suggests that immigration has a small impact on average wages of existing workers but more significant effects along the wage distribution: low-wage workers lose while medium and high-paid workers gain.”

Middle class leftists also want to think that migration causes no problems because they like migration. They like migration because it benefits them. They know people who have migrated, they have migrated themselves (as I have) or they are in relationships with migrants (as I am). So they tend to support migration because they like it and they don’t see the effects.

But the general public have a different experience. They realise that low-end migration impacts their wages while high-end migration does not. See:

“Despite the clear opposition to overall immigration, more specific polling questions reveal that attitudes depend on the type of immigrant in question. For example, a 2011 Migration Observatory/IpsosMORI study found that attitudes toward low-skilled labour migrants, extended family members, and asylum seekers were much more negative than attitudes to high-skilled migrants, students, and close family members.”

So the public’s opinions are closer to fact than those of what I call ‘paternalist leftists’. I’m open to hearing why the public are, in fact, wrong and the paternalistic leftists are right. Give me a solid argument and I’ll sign up. After all, being a migrant that would be a much more comfortable position for me to defend. But I just don’t think it squares with the facts.

Open to being proved wrong. But I must be PROVED wrong. Not given arguments from authority.

"This is why the left will never win. They believe what they want to be true over what is actually true. And they’ll find themselves instituting low wage policies favoured by neoliberals until they get it together. Which is why anti-neoliberal policies will eventually be attacked by the far right and not the left. It’s happening already actually."http://jwmason.org/slackwire/which-one-is-brexit/#comment-7026---------

Yes... This is what makes my blood boil. How is it that the Left hasn't made *massive capital* out of the catastrophe of the Eurozone, the post-2008 global recession, and austerity?

How is it that -- with a few exceptions like Syriza -- the populist right in Europe seems to the main beneficiaries of disaster after disaster?

If you look closely at the anti-EU populist parties, they are divided between:

(1) quasi-libertarian or Thatcherite nationalists, or

(2) protectionist or broadly left-leaning social democratic nationalists.------Group (2) includes the Danish People's Party, Sweden Democrats, and French National Front, the latter being very hostile to neoliberalism.

This is a testimony to the bankruptcy of the mainstream left that they couldn't win over a large % of these people who have shifted to the populist right, because there is some evidence that a lot of these are angry "protest" voters who would switch if they had a decent left-wing option.